John Newton The Tough Roots Of His Wrongness

“Just follow your heart!” We often hear this phrase parroted to us by relatives, friends, and culture at large. Unfortunately this maxim is a misleading, well-cloaked lie. God testifies through the prophet Jeremiah, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9) How can we trust a wicked heart? Furthermore, in Romans, the apostle Paul declares all humans fundamentally evil (Rom. 3:9-18). According to the Bible, the reason we are evil isn’t because we do evil things; instead, we do evil things because we are evil (Mark 7:20-23, Luke 6:43-45, etc.). John Newton understood the gravity of his sinful nature. His famous hymn, “Amazing Grace”, portrays awe in light of the grace God has bestowed
John Newton is an excellent example. Unless otherwise indicated, all biographical information I used was found in a lecture entitled “John Newton: The Tough Roots of His Habitual Tenderness” by John Piper. John Newton was born the year 1725 in London, England. He had a harsh, unaffectionate relationship with his father, who was an unbelieving sailor. His mother was a staunch Christian, and faithfully raised him in the Lord, but sadly died when he was only six years old. Shortly after she died, he was sent to boarding school for two years; this accounted for the entirety of his formal education. He began sailing at the age of eleven, and was forced into the Royal Navy at the age of eighteen. The company of fellow sailors brought his supposed good character to nothing. Despite succumbing to the lifestyle, he still despised the work. He unsuccessfully tried to desert his ship on one of the visits home, and as a result, was demoted, flogged, and kept in chains for two days. Because of his insubordination, he was eventually kicked off his ship on an island near Sierra Leone, and fell into slavery for a year and a half where he was treated brutally. By God’s providence, a ship whose captain knew Newton’s father landed on that island unplanned, and rescued him. He stayed on the ship until it returned to England. During the return home, the ship ran into a
Newton’s most famous work, now known as “Amazing Grace,” though originally published in Olney Hymns as “Faith’s Review and Expectation,” is littered with Biblical allusions which cascade praises of God’s transforming mercy. In his book titled Amazing Grace, Steve Turner states that “Every word in ‘Amazing Grace’ appears to have been carefully chosen… he was aiming for spiritual veracity, only secondarily for lyrical impact” (84). Turner also pointed out this powerful allusion: “The image of being lost and found alludes to the parable of the Prodigal Son, where the father… [says] in Luke 15:24: ‘For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found’” (84). Turner made many additional connections that for the sake of space I will not be able to include. However, there was one that he didn’t (to my knowledge) point out that I believe is very influential. The often repeated opening stanza of the hymn’s first two lines immediately reminds me of a somewhat lengthy passage from the second chapter of Ephesians, where Paul says that all Christians were originally “dead in [sin]… carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath… But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ – by grace you have been saved… not [as] a result